Mood Mapper

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Mood Mapper is about “sentiment analysis”: understanding trends in how people across Metro Vancouver are feeling. We will primarily analyze open social media channels such as Twitter, map the results against regional geography, and then correlate them with issues, events and other phenomena evident in Urban Opus data streams. The objective of the project is to activate a unique new source of citizen data and seek to understand the intersection of its trends with others that impact the region.

Mood Mapper involves a passive form of participatory sensing: people may not even realize it when they are carried away by the ebbs and flows of collective sentiment, yet it colours their social media presence. Mood is a unique citizen data channel that is an important variable in the social pulse of Metro Vancouver.

Description

The Mood Mapper project aims to understand the trends in what Metro citizens are feeling and what their issues are. It works by mining social media feeds and other real time data to sense issues that are high priority for citizens and map the general mood across the lower mainland.

By mining social media feeds, Mood Mapper is able to determine the emotional context of social media posts and uses algorithms to cluster sentiments into an aggregate picture of mood across a geographical area. Are people happy in Kits, is Surrey central abuzz, are people aggravated by traffic delays on the Port Mann bridge. Mood affects the general population and impacts city officials striving to prioritize resources.

The advantage for this project within Urban Opus is the ability to ‘mash up’ a great variety of data feeds to determine if sentiment can be correlated with other phenomena and events, to search for cause and effect: is transit meeting expectations, is traffic worse than normal, how do people feel about new developments, is the weather getting people down. An interesting feature of the system is the ability to track how people respond to emerging news and events – is the concert going well, what’s the mood around the fireworks, or even if a spontaneous demonstration has started in downtown.

Activation Path

The Mood Mapper app can be deployed within six (6) months:

Identification of Partner/Host organization

Clarification of region-specific requirements

Identification of development partner

Prototype implementation and testing

Theming and construction

Alpha-level app deployment

References

About Urban Opus

Urban Opus is Canada’s first ‘smart city’ industry cluster. The new consortium serves as trusted broker for innovative projects and organizations seeking to employ data to enhance the urban experience. In great cities of the world, the consummate wellbeing of people and communities is being inspired by data. Join us to make that happen!